The Wright stuff
By Miles O'Brien
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It was a blustery morning that day on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A perfect day for flying ... as it turns out.
Wilbur and Orville -- the original Wright stuff -- slipped the surly bonds under power in a quartet of brief flights. The dream was suddenly a reality. It was December 17, 1903 -- 99 years ago.
To mark the moment and to begin a yearlong centennial celebration, the aviation and space cognoscenti gathered at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum to remember the Wrights -- and all those who stood upon their shoulders.
Neil Armstrong was there. The normally media-shy man who first laid footprints on the moon sat down with me for a rare interview.
"As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember," said Dr. Armstrong.
The command module known as Columbia -- the titanium spacecraft that took Armstrong to the moon -- sits in the shadow of the wood and muslin Wright Flyer. It is charred from the fiery re-entry into the atmosphere of Earth. They are impressive bookends for the museum's Milestones in Flight Gallery.
"I guess that's the story of flight in the 20th century: from the beginning, the very first flights at Kitty Hawk to the various, very furthest and fastest flights that man has ever made," said Armstrong.
And there was another Ohioan here who made his own indelible mark on the sky -- a man who fell in love with flight as a boy the day his father took him on a 10-minute ride in an open-cockpit Waco.
"What impresses me every time I come in and see this thing," said former astronaut and Sen. John Glenn, "is how fast aviation advanced beyond the Wright brothers. If you think it was only about 15 years until they were dog fighting over France in WWI..."
Lost amid the high praise is a stubborn embarrassment of history. Ninety-nine years ago, the Smithsonian refused to give proper credit to the Wrights -- and was not even interested in displaying the Flyer. The curators instead focused on the aviation exploits of a former Smithsonian secretary, Samuel Pierpoint Langley.
Langley launched his Aerodrome off a houseboat and straight into the Potomac River before the Wright Flyer took flight.
The Smithsonian tried its best to re-write history -- commissioning the construction of the Aerodrome replica. The plane was tested -- and pronounced capable of flight -- and it hung in the Smithsonian for years as the vanguard powered airplane.
Piqued with anger, Orville Wright shipped his historic craft to a museum in Great Britain. The Smithsonian did not see the error of its ways and bring the Flyer home until 1948.
"I think uncle Orv wanted to be recognized for what was due to them," said the Wrights great-grand niece Amanda Wright Lane. "No more, no less. He was a very honorable man and a patriot, and he just wanted to be recognized as the first folk that flown, and they did. Unfortunately, that transpired before he died, but he didn't get to see the plane here before he died."
Now millions see the Flyer it for what it was. It makes one wonder what might be. I asked Neil Armstrong to look in his crystal ball:
"I think my predictions for the next century will be just as good as the people watching the Wrights would have been a century ago, about what would have happened this century. If we look back a century from now we would have been really amazed at what would have happened," said he.
Even Orville and Wilbur -- visionary as they were -- could not have seen the wonderful craft that hang from the rafters here, nor could they have fathomed the profound ways those machines have changed our world.
